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I Run

An Exhibition of Digital Work, Text and Assemblage By David Hughes:

Feb 4th – March 4th, 2010

The Work:

In 2007 I was given an award from Arts & Disability Awards Ireland to experiment with work which would combine text, photography, painting, assemblage, print, video, sound and music. I wanted to see if I could find a structure like digital collage or assemblage. Something I could disseminate digitally through DVD’s or web streaming.  The term I have come to use for these computer-based works is Digital Opera. For this reason: the word ‘Opera’ is the plural of ‘Opus’ (a creative work). So for me ‘opera’ means that ‘the work’ is composed from a number of ‘works’. But ‘Opera’ of course has the added dimension of TIME, as do these works.

I have had depression for some years with its associated exhaustion and anxiety. So this work has been developing slowly. The spaces I work in are very important to me and have a considerable influence on the work and how I show it. The work has something of the nature of the shrine, a place of pilgrimage and of refuge. Domestic objects, events and fabrics appear in and around the work.

Having been in therapy for some time, I am in the habit of focusing on language and teasing it apart and looking at actions or the surfaces of things to try and understand their emotional impact or resonance. Not surprising then that in this work I fixate on surfaces, small actions and the plays of language.

Biography:
I trained as an actor and director in the ‘70s at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In Cardiff, in 1976, I set up an experimental theatre company making a kind of improvised jazz theatre of language, music and dance. In the 80s I studied philosophy and critical theory at Warwick and Southampton and worked as a freelance arts journalist before setting up my own arts magazines dedicated to performance art (Live Art Listings, Hybrid Magazine and Live Art Magazine). In the early 90s, whilst continuing to publish and edit, I was a senior lecturer on the Contemporary Arts degree at Nottingham Trent University. I moved to be Head of Theatre at the University of Hull in 2001.

Following a period of deep clinical depression from 2002 – 2004 I decided to leave academic work and to concentrate on helping to look after my young family, writing, making art, training to be a therapist, being in therapy, and occasionally reviewing art. My partner and I have two sons and have lived in Drumbo, near Lisburn, since 2005. I work as a support group facilitator with Aware Defeat Depression. I showed assemblages at the ADF Gallery in December 2006 and graphic texts in February 2007.
See more of my work at: http://www.macwh.net/bridger

Alien architecture:
Beside the M1 and the ring road in Belfast there are some buildings which fascinate me because they look like they might be from another time and another place. They remind me of the suburbs in the movies of Wenders and Fassbinder and Godard. So they have a magic about them. But they seem out of place here. I have shot footage of them over the last two years without knowing quite why or for what.

An Old Injury and A Fall:
One day, in the rain, I am twisting to lift my son Aaron from the car and my ankle gives way.

Will I fall and drop him? Will I injure him? Will I knock myself out and leave him crying beside his unconscious daddy?

I wrote a short poem about that feeling of vulnerability.

Such catastrophic scenarios frequently flash through my mind; and not without some justification. On holiday in the Lake District in 2001 my ankle gives way when I am carrying Aaron’s brother Mercer and we stumble on a bank. With some kind of presence of mind I gently throw him up onto the path whilst I fall into the road.

I Run:

I pick up the child.

It is raining.

I run.

I slip.

I twist my foot.

I fall.

We die.

Blue Walls:
Around my sons’ school are sections of blue wall separated by railing. The blue ranges from a powdery sky blue to a dark, purply blue. Some of it pristine some of it water stained and bleached and crumbling.

Colour Blindness:
I structure the relation between text and background on the basis of two spectra: one travels from red to green, whilst the other travels from green to red. Somewhere in the middle they are both kind of brown. This structure can be seen most clearly in the Truth Tables, poster poems.

Description:
IF you can describe it, THEN that is what it is.

Different Tracks:
My work is mainly concerned with form and shape, pattern and structure. With system. It was always going to be the case that the elements of the Digital Opera were layered in tracks that didn’t have the effect of interpreting each other or accumulating into closed narratives. So there would be a track or tracks of sound. A track or tracks of image. A track of text. Thus the video treatments of any one scene would have a minimum of three tracks (sound, text, image) but might have as many as 10.

Digital Bricolage:
In terms of the process of the work, bricolage is probably the most important idea. Bricolage is a French term that suggests making do, working with what’s to hand. What is to hand for me is the packaging of groceries – cardboard boxes and plastic nets – kitschy souvenirs bought at charity shops,  an old microwave that no longer works, my iPod in its speaker station, the in-car dvd system I bought for the kids but which has sat under my desk for the last 4 years. Digital picture frames, and the canvases and frames of my paintings, prints, collages and assemblages

Frames:
There is a private joke I have: the definition of art is that it is framed. But not totally a joke. I like to work with frames. I buy frames from charity shops, the kind of thing that will have a kitschy dried flower or model yacht in it. They tend to be very cheap and very robust. I like to shift the kitschy object into another frame, gather them together in assemblages, try and elevate their status from kitsch to art: or rather, from kitsch to super-kitsch. They are the frames which I also use to house my own objects which I hope have the status of art (or super-kitsch) from the outset. It is a little machine. Sometimes I will simply take the kitschy objects from two kitschy frames and swap them over. Does that make them art, I wonder?

Machines:
I like the idea of machines that do things in the creative process. Change ringing tables and truth tables are both little engines, little machines into which you can put materials and out of which come scores, works, objects.

Mathematics:
I am no kind of a mathematician but I’ve always been fascinated by numbers. Particularly the grids and scores that register the changing places of church bells in change ringing sequences. Church bell rings don’t generally play melodies, they play patterns and there are hundreds of patterns such as Double Bob Major, Grandsire Doubles, and Cambridge Surprise Minor.

I took the 5 central ‘action’ phrases of my short poem and assumed they were bells or voices. Using change ringing software I generated lines in which the placement of the phrases changed line by line.

Different narratives were suggested by each line. They weren’t great dramas, just subtle changes in cause and effect. They had a cinematic quality: shot of rain, someone is running, they slip, they twist their foot and they fall. Or. Someone is walking, they twist their foot, they start to run a kind of hobbling run, it is raining, they slip and fall. And so on.

Metempsychosis (‘Metem’ for short):
Metempsychosis was the belief, held by the Ancient Greeks, that the soul passed on to other animals or humans after death. I use the term to refer to the process of taking material from one place and putting it in another, thus producing, for example, two canvasses that share features and which have a kind of mirror relation to each other. Two identical canvasses are painted black. Threads are twisted and knotted and put on the surface of one. It is then painted over in white. The white threads are now moved to the black canvas. Thus the under painted black shows through as black drawing on a white ground and the white threads sit on the black background as the drawing reversed out.

I have transferred this process over to the video work as a structuring principle.

Muscae volitantes :
The threads on the Metem canvasses refer to my Muscae volitantes, ‘floaters’. These are those little dot- and string- like shapes which seem to float across the surface of the eye. They are attributed to minute remnants of embryonic structures in the vitreous humour. It is not the actual debris that we see, of course, as the focusing instrument is the lens and they are behind the lens. What we see are the shadows of the debris thrown onto the retina.

Music:
The music I am using for this project is mainly by Tim Howle, an electro-acoustic composer and Head of Music at the University of Hull.  When I am making the work I start off each scene of the opera with the music track which arbitrarily establishes the length of the scene.

Structure of the text:
I started with the 7 line poem, I Run. I generated a 16 line score that had the 5 action phrases rearranged in each line. I called this A. I reversed the entire order of A to give me B. I now used the Truth Tables to give me 16 poems which put A and B into different logical relations. I now have 17 poems. The basic short poem I first wrote plus 16 others. If you like I had the score for an opera in 16 scenes. I also had a publication, a sixteen page text.

Truth Tables:
Truth tables are little machines in formal logic which show the permutations possible when using logical connectors between propositions. For example: IF all men are equal THEN Peter and Paul are equal. Peter and Paul are equal IF AND ONLY IF all men are equal. All men are equal AND Peter and Paul are equal. There are 16 such operators or possible logical connectors.

Why make work?:
You will never die if you are pottering about with It is the only magic ritual I know that wards off death art.

This exhibition is supported by an Arts & Disability Award Ireland, which is funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Arts Council /An Chomhairle Ealaion, administered by the Arts & Disability Forum.

For further information on the ADF Gallery, or to find out more about the Arts & Disability Awards Ireland bursary and the Arts & Disability Forum, contact Leo Devlin, Gallery Officer, on 028 9023 9450 or e-mail info@adf.ie